Evening Star

10

Though it contains Brian Eno’s signature lolling synthesizers, Evening Star, more than much of his ambient work, has a feeling of induction. That welcomeness owes much to King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp’s warm noodling and plucking; he’s like a wedding musician if the whole world was getting married.

Evening Star, which opens with the National Geographic-esque titled “Wind on Water,” maintains its ebullient tone throughout its first half. But the second side, the almost 30-minute track, “An Index of Metals,” shows the sinister side of the duo, with less synthesizer bounce and more iciness. It’s less playful than the first half, and more shocking. It stands in stark contrast to the rest of the 1970s, when others made ambient music that felt allegorically about life and death, the two locked in some eternal competition. Rather than co-mingle the two, Fripp and Eno split them like some kind of fork in the road. –Matthew Schnipper

Harmony in Ultraviolet

9

Tim Hecker’s style of ambiance has always shaded dark, but Harmony in Ultravioletis his purest exploration of what lies beneath. Where his earlier work favored the crackle of garbled transmissions and clanging metallic wires, Harmony in Ultraviolet leans toward heavy, layered drone, drifting by like a massive airship that appears far too heavy to remain aloft, a Star Wars-scale object that blots out the sky and shoots off sparks. His palette includes pipe organs, gnarly guitar feedback, static, and woozy strings, all of which come together for music of awe, the feeling of contemplating an erupting volcano or a massive tornado from a safe distance. It makes you feel small, one speck on a pale blue dot. Harmony is the rare ambient album that begs to be played loud. –Mark Richardson

Deep Listening

8

Pauline Oliveros has called improvisation thenatural state of human existence—because, amidst even all the surface chaos of everyday experience, “the universe is improvising...and we have evolution, so [improvisation] is always happening.” It’s why, to Oliveros, the most considerate way to live is to listen. So, in 1988, she descended 14 feet beneath the earth, into a cistern located in Washington where sounds reverberated up to 45 seconds in the dampness. She brought the trombonist Stuart Dempster and the sound artist/vocalist Panaiotis to record music that doesn’t sound of this world. The trio carried with them an accordion, trombone, didgeridoo, garden hose, conch shell and a pipe, which all became mangled by the bigness of the room.

Deep Listening, the recording born of these sessions, feels cosmic, like listening to the echoes of the Big Bang. It begat a new philosophy of the same name which focused on the possibilities of truly paying attention, retuning and calibrating your ears to allow for meditation and the preservation of well being. Deep Listening introduced into ambient music the radical possibilities of the body to overcome itself, just by listening hard enough. –Kevin Lozano

94diskont

7

In the run-up to the new millennium, as digital technology inserted itself ever more deeply into our lives, ideas about progress and creative misuse were in the air, as unmistakable as the gravelly pings of the dial-up modem sitting in the corner of your office. Enter Oval, the German trio of Markus Popp, Frank Metzger, and Sebastian Oschatz, who made their name early on by sampling the sound of skipping CDs. If Systemisch is where Oval first distilled their idea down to its essence, then 94diskont is where they discovered their homemade medium’s expressive potential.

Bit-crushed chirps and desiccated hiccups establish the basic vocabulary that will come to define “glitch music” for the next decade; some of the album’s more abstracted tracks, like “Commerce Server,” sound like a peripheral device coughing up pixels. On centerpiece “Do While,” glassy pings skitter like snowflakes across the frozen surface of a pond; bell tones rise and fall in pitch, glowing with an eerie luminescence. There’s nothing more to it than a handful of short, overlapping loops, yet something about the way they wrap around each other only draws you deeper into the mix with every elliptical pass. It goes on like that for 24 minutes, but it’s not hard to imagine letting it run for one’s entire waking day. Like Satie’s furniture music or Eno’s airport ambience, it’s a sound that both fades into the background and charges the very air around you. –Philip Sherburne

The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid

6

One great use of a synthesizer is to hold down a note, turn some knobs, and listen to it sparkle— to examine the big swells of harmonics created when a bundle of circuits try to sound like violins or trumpets. Lots of great music, ambient and otherwise, has been made by folks holding down keys on synthesizers.

The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid seems to reverse-engineer this practice; Adam Wiltzie and Brian McBride employ actual strings and brass, piling them on top of each other and sustaining them into gaseous clouds of overtones. Chemtrails of reverb and delay amplify this feeling as the music veers wildly between a low hum and a medium-ish hum. The arrangements find the middle ground between careful composition and pure drone, and the result is so beautiful and sad, it becomes funny, something the song titles seem to acknowledge (see: “The Lonely People (Are Getting Lonelier)”). Turns out, misfits and wise-asses are capable of grand gestures, too. –Andrew Gaerig

Chill Out

5

The title Chill Out—a reference to the chill-out rooms common at raves in the late ’80s—harkens back to a time when ambient music was uniquely functional. It was comedown sauce for dancers and users who required womb-like enclosures, sonic or otherwise. Chill Out, which dropped as this functionality was crystallizing into a style of its own, is not useful in this way. Far from feeling encompassing, its diffused clatter of samples and references seems to let anything and everything pass through. It is an obtuse piss-take, because the entirety of the KLF's existence was an obtuse piss-take.

Still, Chill Out has earned a place in the ambient ranks because of the serenity in the group's sample-adelic quiltwork, plus a commitment to scene-setting (it purportedly describes a train journey from Texas to Louisiana). There’s a tranquility that would be completely unnecessary if the duo of Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond were just cracking wise. In emphasizing the specifics—Elvis launching into “In the Ghetto,” or a preacher repeatedly imploring you, the listener, to get ready—they achieved a kind of wayward, everyday clamor: music and voices and car horns, all sinking in deep. –Andrew Gaerig

A Rainbow in Curved Air

4

The original jacket art for A Rainbow in Curved Air includes a short utopian poem that begins, “And then all wars ended.” It explores a world in which the Pentagon has been tipped over and painted psychedelic colors, all of lower Manhattan is transformed into a pastoral wonderland, vegetarianism reigns worldwide, the boundaries of society become porous, and, ultimately, “the concept of work was forgotten.” When it was released in 1969, the poem was probably not much of a surprise, as hippie culture was already ubiquitous, but it gives distinct hopefulness to Terry Riley’s monumentally influential piece of minimalist composition.

Its visions speak to the friendliness of A Rainbow in Curved Air. The piece is a warm sensorium of repeated notes and early electronic weirdness, and it still sounds fitting in an incense-filled ashram or a hazy dorm room. The piece was Riley’s most commercially oriented; it leaked into the mainstream, inspiring the keyboard repetitions of The Who’s “Baba O’Riley,” and it also foreshadowed the hypnotic overdubbing techniques of Steve Reich and William Basinski, bridging generations of experimental music makers.

What really makes A Rainbow in Curved Air so special is its overwhelming sense of optimism; of all its qualities, this is the one that has never been reproduced exactly the same. It feels good to be listening to this music: It permeates the air, makes the world feel sweeter, lets the drudgery of work disappear. It’s truly the ideal world Riley imagined in his poem—and it feels like music that soundtracks discovery. –Kevin Lozano

The Disintegration Loops I-IV

3

In a healthy state, analog tape is pale brown, the color of the magnetic audio recording contained therein. In 2001, William Basinski, looking to digitize a collection of older tape loops he’d made out of easy listening music, found that the tape began to flake a bit as it played, like paint peeling. Playing the loops repeatedly, they began to lose their composition as the tape disintegrated. What starts as a snippet of a forlorn brass instrument eventually degraded into a pale imitation, as though he’d produced a composition and then, immediately after, performed its faded memory.

The Disintegration Loops is immensely long (the first of its four parts is over an hour), but it is made up of repeated snippets sometimes as short as five or 10 seconds. Over the course of that mammoth running time, you hear the piece fall apart, literally. “I’m recording the life and death of a melody,” Basinski said in a 2011 Radiolab interview. “It just made me think of human beings, you know, and how we die.” The mysteries of life and death are perhaps too big a question to be answered by tape drone, and Basinski doesn’t attempt to. His piece is beautiful and sad, temporal and infinite; its changes are imperceptible, yet ever-present. It sounds like wind, like a ship’s horn heard in the distance when lost at sea, on track to either rescuing you or passing you by.

Basinski made the accidental discovery of the tapes’ disintegration in 2001, shortly before the attacks on the World Trade Center. From his home in Brooklyn on September 11th, he made a short film of the light just before the evening’s end. When Disintegration Loops was released, a still from that film made up its cover. The music has since been entwined with the loss of that day, and rightfully so, but it represents forward momentum, too. Hearing the sound slowly degrade, it's clear it will eventually disappear entirely. But until then, it keeps going, trying its best to play before reaching the end. –Matthew Schnipper

Selected Ambient Works Volume II

2

With Selected Ambient Works 85-92, Richard D. James established “ambient techno” as a viable concept rather than a contradiction in terms. But soon this serene offshoot of banging rave floor music became its own New Age-y cul-de-sac. Bloody-minded as ever, for its follow-up, James switched from chill-out to chilling: ominously featureless soundscapes woven from abstract textures and eerily fixated pulses. Gone, for the most part, were those lovely Aphex melodies shimmering like dewdrops on a spider web. The project’s foreboding aura was intensified by the absence of track titles: All 24 tracks were identified only by images of texture swatches such as lichen or weathered stone, as if to deliberately exacerbate the listener’s sensation of being lost.

There was beauty here, still, but a peculiar and unsettling kind: The opener, for instance, modulates a voice into a baby-talk squiggle, then ripples it through a hall-of-mirrors echo. James trailed the project—which proved as influential as its predecessor, with similarly mixed results—by talking about the inspiration he’d drawn from experiments with lucid dreaming, techniques that allow the sleeper to steer the storyline of a nocturnal adventure. True or not, the effect of this music feels exactly like being inside a dream: not necessarily idyllic, with a strangeness that haunts you long into your waking day. –Simon Reynolds

Ambient 1: Music for Airports

1

Eno may not have invented the idea of atmospheric sound, but he gave it a name: ambient music. (No offense to Erik Satie, but Brian Eno is the whole reason you're reading this feature.) Eno, the 1970s’ wiliest and most reflective pop-star/philosopher, sought a functional music that could color the air to suit certain moods—the sonic equivalent of perfume, or air freshener. He set his quest in opposition to what was then the dominant form of environmental music: easy listening and “elevator music,” orchestral arrangements of pop hits, which he deemed “lightweight and derivative.” Snobbery was built into ambient music from the beginning: Eno aspired to create not just any atmospheres, but above all, tasteful ones.

But he wanted to coax, not impose. Rather than “blanketing” a given environment, Eno imagined sounds that could enhance a space’s emotional resonance; he favored sounds conducive to doubt and uncertainty, as well as those favoring calm and thoughtfulness. In other words, he wanted to create background music for loners, aesthetes, and introverts, and that’s precisely what he achieved with Ambient 1: Music for Airports. Its piano and synthesizer melodies move as gently, and seemingly without purpose, as a mobile in still air. Simultaneously wistful and beatific, it is emotionally open-ended, and it makes for an ideal mood-enhancer, at least for the listener in a reflective headspace. If only any airport on earth were like this; the image it evokes—of patient, optimistic travelers gliding soundlessly along moving walkways while sun falls across gleaming surfaces of aluminum and glass—seems unlikely to be made real in our lifetimes. That train to the future has long since left the station (and derailed in a fiery heap). For the listener curious about ambient music who has no idea where to begin, there really is no better introduction than this. –Philip Sherburne